Located in a building that once housed Nashville's trolleys, the center is three times as big as its former site on Broadway and includes large event rooms, several meeting rooms with transparent walls, workspaces for startup teams and a cafe run by the Turnip Truck. The center is expected to help 100 companies launch each year and help Nashville further develop as an entrepreneurial community.

"It scales us in every direction," said CEO Michael Burcham. "It brings legitimacy to Nashville as the best place to start a business."

The Entrepreneur Center is among similar hubs created in other U.S. cities., such as Washington, D.C., and Chicago. Having a campus that allows individuals with entrepreneurial interests to interact with, challenge and learn from one another is an important component of facilitating startup growth, said Startup America CEO Scott Case, who was visiting the new center this week.

"Being with other people who are ahead of you in that process and in some ways behind you in that process, it's sort of the crucible through which much, much better businesses go through," he said. "If you are not in place with a strong community … and Nashville is one of the fastest-emerging strong startup communities in the country, you tend to not have the quality of companies come out of it."

The impact of the new center goes beyond entrepreneurial circles, Case said, adding that all net job growth in the past 30 years has come from companies younger than five years old.

"The success of any city in America is tied directly to the quality and robustness of the startup community," he said. "If you aren't growing your own in your city or your state, you are going to be at a significant disadvantage to other cities and states around the country. ... Our whole country becomes at a disadvantage."